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^^rmaity nnh tly^ Wat 

A SERMON 



BY THE 



REV. CHARLES WOOD. D.D. 




Preached in the 
CHURCH OF THE COVENANT 

WASHINGTON, D. C. 



SUNDAY EVENING 

DECEMBER 6, 1914 

Printed by Request 



Gii» 
Camefie Intt 
JUN 3 ^^24 







GERMANY AND THE WAR 



"Thou, Oh King, art a King of Kings." Daniel 2 :37. 

The German Kaiser rules over more kings than ever stood 
at the foot of Nebuchadnezzar's throne. In the confeder- 
ation of which he is the chief, there are four kings, includ- 
ing himself, Prussia, Bavaria, Saxony and Wurtemberg. 
There are six Grand Duchies — each Grand Duke is almost 
a king: one more step up and he sits on his own throne; 
five Duchies, seven principalities, three free cities — Bremen, 
Hamburg and Lubeck; and one imperial province, Alsace- 
Lorraine. 

In this great confederation, so very like and yet so very 
unlike ours, there are 209,000 square miles, just about the 
size of France, which is 60,000 square miles less than 
our State of Texas, and 588,000 square miles less than 
Alaska, and 2,954,000 square miles less than the United 

1 



States, without Alaska. But bigness is not necessarily 
greatness. The population of these 209,000 square miles 
is 65,000,000, and the arm)'-, on a war footing, is five mil- 
lions and a half. 

Modern Germany is the legitimate successor of the 
mediaeval empire called The Holy Roman Empire, which 
governed that section of Europe which we now speak of 
as Germany, for eight hundred and forty-two years. It 
has been said of it — that it was not an Empire — that it was 
not Roman — and that it was the very furthest possible re- 
moved from being holy. The best thing The Holy Roman 
Empire ever did was to of¥er itself as a subject for an essay 
to a young Oxford graduate, twenty-six years of age. In 
making that book James Bryce made himself famous. 

The modern German Empire is a Prussian product; and 
Prussia herself, as a dominant power, is of yesterday. It 
was not until after the victory of Koniggratz, in 
1866, that the voice of Prussia compelled attention even 
in Europe ; but Prussian history extends its roots very much 
farther back. Within a hundred years after William came 
from Normandy, and, landing on the shores of England, con- 
quered Harold of Hastings, becoming henceforth "William 
The Conqueror" — William of Germany seems not unwill- 
ing to follow in the wake of that same little vessel, and, 
landing on the same shores, gain, if may be, the same title. 

In 1170, then one hundred and four years after the Nor- 
man conquest, a younger son named Conrad left his father's 
castle of Hohenzollern, in Swabia. "Hohenzollern" means 
"the high toll place," and many of you have seen the castle, 
doubtless, as you have passed quite within sight of it on the 



railway. Young Conrad went to the Court of Barbarossa, 
the great emperor of that day of The Holy Roman Empire, 
and, being very attractive and winning, he advanced rap- 
idly. He married the daughter of the Burggraf of Nurem- 
berg and soon became Burggraf himself. In the constant 
shuffle, in which kingdoms and principalities were the cards, 
the successors of this Burggraf found themselves Electors 
of Brandenburg, known to us as Prussia. From that time 
the history of Prussia becomes the history of the Hohen- 
zollerns, and the history of the Hohenzollerns is the history 
of Germany. 

The first epoch we must notice in that history is the 
Reformation. Martin Luther was a German monk, born in 
Saxon Eisleben, and dying in Eisleben, but teaching most 
of his life at Wittemberg, and Wittemberg is on a wide, 
sandy plain 60 miles south of Berlin. 

In Martin Luther's day, there was no king in Prussia — 
only an elector — Joachim II. He fell under the influence 
of Martin Luther, and many of his people were converts of 
the new doctrine. This elector did what many other elec- 
tors and princes of that era did : he took his electorate 
over with him into the Refomied Church, and from that 
time Prussia has been nominally Protestant. Whether 
Joachim himself and the majority of his subjects were 
really converted, except to Protestantism as a theological 
system, is very doubtful. 

The second epoch is that of the Thirty Years' War, a 
war more horrible, I think, even than that which now tears 
Europe asunder, for it was a so-called "Religious War." 
Men hated each other and killed each other be- 



cause some were Protestants and some were Catho- 
lics — and for no other reason whatever. When that 
war began, in 1618, there were thirty millions of 
people living in Germany, and when that war ended, in 
1648, there were twelve millions of people left alive. Whole 
provinces had been desolated and great cities, like Magde- 
burg, were left without one stone upon another. 

The third epoch is that of Frederick the Great. Two 
Englishmen have written the life of Frederick, in whole or 
in part, with equal eloquence — Thomas Carlyle and Thomas 
B. Macaulay. Frederick is Carlyle's hero and Macaulay's 
detestation. Carlyle said that in a century of chicanery and 
fraud and lying, Frederick was the one man who dared to 
be true, and Macaulay said "That in order to rob a neigh- 
bor — Maria Theresa — whom he had promised to defend, 
black men fought on the coast of Coromandel and red men 
scalped each other on the Great Lakes of North America." 

Frederick the Great is confessedly the ideal of William 
the Second, and the character of William the Second is, 
perhaps, equally problematic. 

The fourth epoch is that of the Napoleonic Wars. When 
we Americans read the story of the wars of Napoleon we 
are pro-German and pro-Prussian, at least pro tem. Beau- 
tiful and unhappy Queen Louise, as she comes down the 
stairway in the picture that hangs in every German gallery, 
and copies of which are in every German home — walks 
straight into our hearts. When she weeps, after the over- 
whelming defeat of Jena, asking Napoleon only that her 
country might not be utterly crushed, we weep with her 
and wish that she might have been king in the place of 



her timid husband. Napoleon, as he stood by the tomb of 
the great Frederick, said, so the story runs, "Had he been 
alive, we would never have been here." Had Queen Louise 
worn the crown, Napoleon might never have conquered 
Prussia. When she pleaded with Napoleon that the king- 
dom might not be dismembered, he smiled a sardonic smile, 
and wrote in his diary that, in spite of her beauty and tears, 
she got nothing from him. When she stands hopeless 
beside the broken carriage, in which she had fled with her 
two boys, while the enemy is in hot pursuit, we look away 
with dimmed eyes. Fifty-five years later the younger of 
those boys stands, not as a captive, but as a conqueror, in 
Versailles, and there, amid his generals, his princes and his 
kings he is crowned Emperor of Germany, within the walls 
covered with great paintings depicting the victories of Na- 
poleon and the shame of Prussia! 

The fifth epoch is that of modern Germany, which began 
with that coronation in 1871 in the French city. 

The 26 units of modern Germany are combined together 
more closely than the units which make up our Republic. 
They have a President for life, and he is chosen already 
before he is born. As long as the family of Hohenzollern 
shall continue to exist, and Germany shall hold to its con- 
federation, the oldest son of the reigning Hohenzollern 
inherits the imperial crown. 

It was my great privilege, in the winter of 1878-9, to be 
a student in the University of Berlin, and I am frank to 
say that I became as thorough a German as it is possible 
for a man to be who has very little aptitude for the German 
tongue, and who considers German philosophy and German 



beer impossible. The most memorable incident of that win- 
ter was the return of the Emperor, William the First — 
whom the Germans have always tried to call William the 
Great, without much success. The homecoming of the 
Emperor after his restoration to health — the assassin had 
almost taken his hfe, and he had been away for some 
months — was a national festival. He came back to Berlin 
with Bismarck, by whose diplomacy and by whose duplicity 
Germany had been made an empire and he had been made 
an Emperor. With him were all the royal family, and all 
the great generals who had fought in the Franco-Prussian 
War, and the reception the people gave their Emperor was 
little short of adoration. 

If only his son, Frederick the Good, had lived — if only 
he had lived! But those short days of his reign passed 
before he had time to work out any of the reforms that 
filled his heart. Then came to the throne of Prussia, and 
to the imperial throne of Germany, the grandson of the 
first William, William the Second, a man whose abilities 
are undoubtedly greater than those of his grandfather, but 
whose philanthropy is undoubtedly less than his father's. 

We cannot conceive what the Emperor is to the German 
people. If only our "Uncle Sam" were not a caricature; if 
he were more of a real father, if he were the embodiment 
of all that we mean by our flag and our national hymn — 
"My Country, 'Tis of Thee" — if he were all this at one 
and the same time, he would be to us what the German 
Emperor is to the German people. He is not a person. He 
is a personification, an ideal. 



After William the Second came to the throne he very soon 
"dropped his pilot," the great Bismarck, who died of a 
broken heart like Napoleon, and like every man who lives 
simply for dominion and power. He confessed, in his 
Reminiscences, that he had instigated three great wars — 
the war against Denmark, the war against Austria, and the 
war against France — and had done many other noteworthy 
and notorious things, but life had been far from satis- 
fying. 

After he dropped the pilot, William the Second took the 
helm and gave the signal "Full speed ahead," and the re- 
sponse was instantaneous. Germany, during his reign, has 
broken all old world records. The Germans, when William 
came to the throne, were an agricultural people. Soon a 
great stroke of good fortune came to them in a most unex- 
pected way. I remember hearing the American Consul at 
Mannheim say to one of his German friends, "You are 
really eating the bones of your ancestors. There is not a 
square inch of your land that has not been exhausted, and 
all the nutriment that comes from it is from ancestral 
nitrates." 

It is not a pleasant thought, but nevertheless it was only 
too true. A few decades ago, owing to a bad debt — it is 
said — in Chile, Germany found herself possessed of a strip 
of desert land along the western coast of Chile, running 
up into Peru, and these lands were found to be incalculably 
rich in nitrates. There are no taxes in Chile. The revenue 
is raised from the nitrate beds. Whenever any one in Chile 
suggests anything that ought to be done by civic contribu- 
tions and generosity, everyone else reminds them of the ni- 



trate beds. These Chilian nitrate beds were a tremendous 
boon for Germany. They doubled her harvest. It was as 
if she had added an acre to every acre she then possessed. 
When we ask why emigration to the United States 
from Germany is so much less than twenty-five years ago 
the answer is largely to be found in the nitrate beds of 
Chile. 

Germany's agricultural gains delayed, but did not prevent, 
her transformation from an agricultural to an industrial 
community. In her industries and manufactures she has 
showed more than Yankee ingenuity. When her manu- 
facturers found that in India all the egg cups coming from 
England were much too large for the small eggs of India, 
the Germans made egg cups to fit the eggs — and there is 
not an English egg cup for sale in all India today. 

When the Africans insisted on using English scissors, 
made at Sheffield, with fine, sharp points, in the place of 
razors as weapons of defence and offence, the English paid 
no attention to the slaughter, but the Germans sent out 
round, dull-pointed scissors, useless as weapons, and no 
other scissors are now used in Africa. 

When the South Americans, from Peru all the way to 
Chile, and from Chile all the way up to Brazil, wanted cer- 
tain kinds of goods with pink ribbons, and certain other 
kinds of goods with iron bands — Englishmen and Ameri- 
cans said "nonsense," but the Germans delivered the goods 
and drove the Englishmen and Americans from those 
mark-ets. 

It was said in Goethe's time that the gods had given the 
land to France, the sea to England, and the air to 

8 



Germany. But we Americans taught Germany how to con- 
quer the air with our aeroplanes, and then, with her extra- 
ordinary aptness, she went much beyond her teacher 
and made better aeroplanes and dirigibles — of which 
we have none — and with them she has conquered the air, and 
now she thinks it would be as well, incidentally, to con- 
quer the sea and the land. She has already, partly, con- 
quered the sea. She is second only to England in her com- 
merce, and she surpasses England in the North German 
Lloyd and the Hamburg-American lines — the two greatest 
steamship lines in the world. 

Germany has done not a little, also, in conquering the land. 
German roads are as good as French roads — and French 
roads are the best in the world. German hotels, of which, 
years ago, many American and English travelers found 
much fault, in the smaller cities at least, are far better than 
French hotels. The German towns are the most per- 
fectly kept in the world, and the German trees in all the 
municipalities are only excelled by the trees in our own 
city. 

The greatest names in Germany — for which we thank 
God — are not the names of marshals and admirals; they 
are the names of philosophers like Leibnitz and Lotze; of 
poets like Goethe and Schiller ; of historians like Mommsen 
and Mosheim; of scientists like Von Humboldt and Roent- 
gen. But the greatest name in German history, some of us 
think, is the name of the greatest of the world's reformers, 
Martin Luther, whose hymn we have sung tonight. 

But this modern Germany has been drinking very deep 
of the cup of which we have been glad to drink all that it 



was possible for us to secure for our own personal use, 
the very inebriating cup of prosperity. In that cup there 
is a deadly poison. It is the poison of materialism, and 
that poison manifests itself by different symptoms. Here 
in America the Germans tell us it has manifested itself in 
Mammonism, the worship of the almighty dollar, and they 
charge us with caring for nothing but money. They are 
not conscious that they have the same poison in their veins. 
It shows itself in Germany by what we call militarism — 
but it is the same poison. 

We have been a little less responsive to that poison than 
the Germans, because we have breathed better air. Our 
environment has been more favorable. We have never 
known what it was to be "cribbed, cabined and confined." 
When we want to stretch, we stretch out toward Alaska, and 
your children's children's children may continue to stretch 
without any danger. But when the German giant wants to 
stretch, where is he going to stretch to? He says, "These 
Lilliputians," as he calls them, "have closed all the doors." 
They have shut the door to the Adiatic, and, during 
the last war, to the opulent East via the Bagdad 
Raihvay. They have left two or three little apertures on 
the Baltic, and a slit, the Kiel Canal, for which I paid half 
as much as you paid for the Panama Canal, which gives 
me an entrance into the North Sea, and I have one or two 
small ports besides, but I can scarcely breathe. I am the 
world's greatest military power — ^you Americans say so, and 
it must be so — but, commercially, I am in Egyptian bondage 



to England." 



10 



At that opportune or inopportune moment came Mephis- 
topheles. He wore a helmet and sword, and hissed, "There 
are but two alternatives for you — dominion or death." 
Later he came in the guise of a philosopher, calling himself 
Nietzsche or Treitschke. or Bernhardi. Philosophic militar- 
ism pushed out the old idealistic philosophy that made the 
German for so many centuries seemingly a dreamer, remote 
from the practical affairs of men. Each of this modern 
trio teaches that war is righteous, that war is a necessity 
for a people that would not grow soft and effeminate. 

The poison of this materialism has hardened the arteries 
of Germany, and if you would see the proof of it, don't 
ask them in England or France for it, but go to Germany 
and look at her art. Look at her Sieges Saule, her 
column of Victory, flaunting itself in the Thiergarten, the 
park of Berlin. Look at that long row of amazing statues 
of conquerors, or would-be conquerors, in the same 
park, and compare their floridness with the sim- 
plicity of Frederick the Great's statue in Unter 
den Linden. If you are not satisfied, go to the 
little city of Worms, and stand beneath the superb 
statue of Martin Luther, the man of the Book, and around 
him men hke himself, men with the Book — all reformers 
and teachers and prophets — and from Worms take the 
rapid express train — there are few more rapid or better in 
the world — to Hamburg, and stand there under the statue 
of the man of blood and iron, Von Bismarck. The great 
Chancellor, girdled about seemingly by cannon, with a great 
sword at his side and fire flashing from his stern eyes, is 
the incarnation of the philosophic militarism of Nietzsche, 

11 



Treitszchke and Bernhardi which he foresaw and feared. 
It is as if we had erected here a colossal statue to George 
Washington in the guise of a multi-millionaire. 

" 'Tis but the moral of all human tales, 
'Tis but the oft-repeated story of the past : 
First freedom, then glory; when that fails, 
Wealth, vice, corruption, barbarism at the last." 

Goethe said : "It is only a little while ago that we Ger- 
mans were barbarians." That does not matter much. It is 
only a little while ago that we Americans, wherever our 
ancestors came from, were barbarians. What does matter 
is this: How long will it be before Germany or America, 
passing swiftly from freedom to glory, shall come to wealth 
— we are in that stage or near it now, some think — to vice, 
corruption, barbarism at the last? 

"This war," the young Crown Prince says, " is the most 
unnecessary and useless that has been fought in modern 
times." It is the most unnecessary and useless and criminal, 
probably, that has ever been fought. But, if those men who 
profess to be Christians, in Germany, and in England, and in 
France, and in Russia and Austria, would but pray — and 
supposedly they are all men of prayer — not "my kingdom 
come," but "Thy kingdom come," and if that prayer were 
echoed by their marshals and admirals and by their men in 
the trenches, might not the hour come speedily — if the peo- 
ples of those lands, and the peoples of the whole world 
would join that prayer, meaning what they say — when a flag 
of truce would be sent out, and these men would rise from 

12 



the trenches and fling down their guns and grasp each other's 
hands, crying : "Brothers all ! Sons of the same Father ! We 
cannot kill each other." You say it is incredible; that it is 
fantastic and visionary. We heard here, from this very 
pulpit, this afternoon of modern miracles in China, where a 
wall greater than the Great Wall, the impenetrable wall 
around the Literati, the scholar class, suddenly fell in 
the midst of the Boxer uprising, and multitudes of the class 
which had spurned Christianity, with unspeakable scorn, 
turned to Christ, giving up the sage Confucius for the lowly 
Nazarene. 

Miracles! "Men of blood and iron," you say, these 
rulers of Europe are, but blood is thicker than water, and 
iron — when you strike it with iron, rings and flashes, and 
when you heat it, it grows red and hisses with its heat, but 
when you raise the temperature a little more the hard iron 
melts and mingles with all the melting iron around, 
and who can then tell whether it was iron from Germany, 
or Russia, or England, or France? Ah! If these men would 
only pray. The diplomats say there are great difficulties — 
impossible difficulties — in the way of peace. There is only 
one difficulty — the lack of love. Let them but love. Let 
them but come together in love, and each might have all 
they want without shedding a drop of blood. Germany 
might get those last 60 miles of the Rhine, and her ships 
could float untroubled to the sea; France might get back 
Alsace-Lorraine; England might keep what she has got — 
she has enough — and Russia might go down to Constanti- 
nople and make it a free city like Hamburg, Lubeck or 
Bremen — and the Turks might be glad to retire to the quiet 

13 



safety of Mecca. It only means a little raising of tem- 
perature, and it is done. 

What Germany needs — this wonderful Germany — is not 
more schools, for her schools are among the best in the 
world. She has only one per cent of illiteracy. Her uni- 
versities have drawn the best scholars of England and 
America, who count it a high privilege to sit in her lecture 
halls — what Germany needs is not more science or phi- 
losophy ; not even more music ; but what she needs is another 
reformer like Martin Luther, a fearless man before kings 
and princes and emperors, a man who shall call the people 
back, not to the god of Joshua, or Gideon, or Judas Mac- 
cabaeus, a god of war — it is dangerous to speak of such a 
god in Germany— but to the God and Father of Our Lord, 
Jesus Christ; a man who shall dare to say, in court and 
camp, as well as in church, that God rules in the heavens and 
on earth, and that it shall not profit a man, be he Kaiser, 
King or serf, to win the world and lose the holy fire that 
burns in every man's soul until it is extinguished. That 
great as Germany is — and France, and England, and Rus- 
sia, and Austria, and the United States — if any one of 
them, or all of them combined, shall dare to break the laws 
of God, they shall each and all utterly perish. 



14 



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